| Artist: | Gaudi, Antoni |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Casa Mila Apartment House, exterior, Barcelona | |
| Date of Work: | 1905-1907 | |
| Nationality: | Spanish | |
| Context: | Turn of the Century | |
| Movement: | Art Nouveau | |
| Medium: | architecture | |
| Subject: an apartment house like no other, shifting the Art Nouveau aesthetic to Spain in the form of Gaudi's highly visionary designs. The building's cut stone looks so organic that it seems like a sea-hollowed cliff that nature evolved rather than man built. Balconies thrust forward like open lips as if the building could breathe, while fantstic chimney shapes crown the roof. The plastic, dynamic facade looks like waves ebbing and flowing; it is a landscape of sculp-architecture with a wonderful, organic vitality. Inside, no 2 floors are exactly alike. Highly individual vision that is a combination of fantasy and engineering. Style: uses stone to look like naturally eroded rock; highly organic. No flat wall facade; instead, the building seems to roll around in a continuous movement of sculptural volumes. The flowing facade alternates between sculptural mass and interpenetrating voids. Has a complex plastic quality. Ironwork grows over the balconies like seaweed or lush vegetation. The roofline undulates. All of these flowing forms are a translation of Art Nouveau line into 3-dimensions. Irregular shapes characterize the large, freestanding structure that opens up around two interior courtyards. An internal skeleton of widely spaced piers eliminated the need for bearing partition walls, and thus the space was freed up to flow in an unprecedented way. Context: in 1880 Barcelona was undergoing a major plan of expansion, and Gaudi was given a rare oppportunity to do highly original work as part of that visionary city plan. Gaudi is an anti-rationalist, but he knows engineering. Nothing is standardized in his buildings and he never repeated himself. His buildings end up expanding the very boundaries of architecture and they inventively build on what is usually a rigidly limited canon. He translates Art Nouveau's flowing linear rhythms into plastic, 3 dimensional form from an extremely individual vision. | ||
